From the Bible, right?” said Sri.
“It’s one of the four books in the second half,” said Chen.
“What is that part?”
“Um … I don’t know. The overview is simple: Jesus died on the cross to save us, rose from the dead after three days. As for Mark 16 …”
“It must mean something,” said Sri.
“I’ll look it up for you,” said Chen.
“Why don’t we cut around it?” Sri’s small finger traced one arm of the cross. The cross expanded to curve across each side of the arm with its faded blue wrought ironwork.
“The manual shows,” Ming said, “to cut here.”
“It is a shame,” said Chen, “to cut this apart.” The manual’s illustration advised an incision directly over the tattooed arm.
“We can easily cut around.” Sri spun his scalpel in the fingers of one hand, which he often did until someone reminded him, or he remembered, that it was not a pen.
“What are you going to do,” said Ming, “save this?”
“It’s bad luck,” said Sri. “Cut around here.” He traced the ornate heart with the handle of his scalpel.
“It’s a nice cross,” agreed Chen.
“You guys.” Ming didn’t look up. She traced the incision lines on the arm. “It’s not going to work. Don’t you want to see the bicipital groove?”
“You should respect a man’s symbols,” said Sri. “My mother told me that. Look at his arm. These are his symbols.”
“Don’t your people burn the corpses anyhow?” said Ming, grabbing the tattooed arm.
“He’s not my people.”
“Let’s get on with it.”
“But that’s not the point,” said Sri.
“So what’s the point? You afraid of lightning bolts?”
“I’m not afraid of you.” He twirled the scalpel nervously, met Ming’s stare.
“Why don’t you cut around,” said Chen, breaking their locked eyes. “Then dissect the subcutaneous layer? It’ll be the same.”
Dr. Harrison was an origami man. In his room of eight tables, they first learned how to make paper boats.
“Let me show you how to tuck in the corners so that it’ll be tight and waterproof,” he said. Each day in the lab, after dissection, came the origami.
“All right, my friends, I hope you’ve learned well and are ready to set your knowledge free.” Each day, every student had to select a page from the lab manual, cut it out carefully at the spiral binding, and fold it into that day’s paper figure. After the boats came paper frogs. Then the paper balls you needed to blow into. They were advised to choose a clean page. They learned that it was easy to make swans after knowing how to make a boat, if you had the trick.
“If you want to take more than one page out of your manual, you may do so,” Dr. Harrison said. “Of course, I may test you on that page. Only anatomy manual origami is allowed.” It was understood that you should make notes before removing a page. You had to take out at least one page.
The swans were hung over the cadavers with twine, and if you forgot something you could look up and see whether it was printed on the wing of a twirling swan.
Halfway through the semester, the days were ending earlier. The sky turned blood to black in the late afternoon. Sri and Chen came in from a dinner break—veggie dogs. Ming didn’t take breaks, instead munched granola bars in the museum section of the basement. They had to stay late because it was the evening before the anatomy midterm. Most of the class was still in the basement, and Sri and Chen found Ming rummaging through the bags of body parts, searching. She explained the situation to them, frustrated but not apologetic.
“What do you mean you lost the right side of the head?” Chen asked quietly.
“No, I didn’t exactly lose it. It’s simply not where I left it,” said Ming.
“You put it in the head bag?” asked Sri.
“Anyway, we’ve got the left side. We can look at someone else’s right.”
“The exam’s tomorrow,” said Chen. The right and left halves of the head had been dissected differently, and the parts needed from the right had been removed from the left.
“Just think for a second. Are you sure you left it here?” asked Sri, fingering the bag that contained the left half of the head.
“I’m sure. I covered it. I sprayed it. It was right here.”
“You’re always in such a rush,” said Sri. “Maybe if you slowed down. … You know how long I spent dissecting those cranial nerves?”
“I bet someone took it,” said Ming.
Sri replied, “Right. Make up a story. You were looking at it, so it was your responsibility to put it back. With the rest of Murphy.”
“Who made you boss? And he’s not a Murphy,” said Ming. “Probably someone borrowed it—it’ll turn up.”
“You lost the head,” Sri whispered, leaning forward and looking at Ming, “and I named him Murphy.”
“It’s only half. And I did not lose it. I left it right here. It’s not where I left it. That’s not ‘losing’ it.”
“Obviously you don’t care,” said Sri.
“Just study it from the manual.”
“I made the cranial nerve page into a swan,” said Chen. He rested his latex-gloved hands on the table.
Ming said, “Should have chosen a different page.”
At two in the morning, only Sri and Chen were in the lab, sitting over the borrowed right half of a head. All the other tables were covered in sheets, and sprayed with the fresh pungency of formalin.
“You know she won’t apologize, but you probably should,” said Chen.
“Why?”
“Because we’ve still got the pelvis and legs to do. It’ll be better if you make peace.”
“This is very bad.”
“Sure, you guys are upset, so just smooth it out.”
“It’s not just her. Losing half his head is bad. And why did she insist we cut through Murphy’s cross and
